UFO Info Week-End

‘We’re here to give you the kind of birth you want

‘We’re here to give you the kind of birth you want.’And the kind of care I experienced was quite different from any previous experience: here was a midwife with the patience to aid properly in the labour, with faith in her capacity to ease the pain.First of all, the water helps. As each wave of pain hits, you can sort of float your body through the warmth and somehow the water carries the peak of the contraction Then the darkened room is soothing. On top of that Maureen would rub my back with lavender oil and, immensely skilful, her hands could touch the worst places with just the right kind of pressure. Every so often, a good witch, she would pop some sweet homeopathic powder under my tongue ‘This will help,’ she said. Well, one is immensely suggestible in labour.Which is not to say I wasn’t yelling and ungrateful towards the end.

By ten to five I was quite sure it was unbearable and calling for an epidural, for forceps, for anything to get that baby out. She was born minutes later, her head delivered into my husband’s hands It was the most clear-sighted, the most emotional of births. Daughter number three came out – according to her sisters who walked in soon after – ‘very dusty, Mum’.So does it matter, after all, how the baby is born? I think the method probably does not. But a feeling of having control over events, of having supportive, involved women around helping – yes, I think that matters a lot.

Unfortunately a choice charter doesn’t deliver that – though better pay for midwives might.-. MEL EDNIE’S onion came to the UK Giant Vegetable Championships last weekend packed in a square wooden box with ‘DANGER’ written on the lid. The heaviest onion in the world, it arrived fresh from its success at the Kelsea Onion Festival. Inside this box was 12lb 4oz of onion, straining against its outer skin like a wrestler in a corset.

Mr Ednie, a builder from Anstruther, Fife, stood nonchalantly aside while two acolytes reverently lifted the beast on to the scales. A kind of procession developed through the Baytree Nurseries, Spalding, the venue for the event, as courtiers attached themselves to the king. Hands reached out to touch Mr Ednie as he passed by, catch some of his luck. ‘All right then, Mel? All right?’ Nobody touched the onion.
‘No, that’s against the rules,’ explained Fred Hayton, an 82-year-old grower from Leeds. ‘You might be tampering,’ he added, giving the word a terrible significance.